Yep! Thoroughly enjoying this thread....

So many posts (including most of mine) are about serious topics; I wanted to post something lighter. And I've had a blast reading the various comments, a number of which bring back memories long forgotten (e.g., FORTRAN data types.)

Excellent. I am loving hearing all of this.
FWIW, one of the ways I tithe has been to
Tutor younger students, and to help others.
There is a decent list of others who helped along the way. But this is uplifting stuff!

language today is simply a means used to distort truth

One of mine was my astronomy teacher. We had a planetarium in our HS and he allowed me to work in there after football and track when everyone else had gone home. So I had the trust of being allowed to use use umpteen thousands (early 70's money) of dollars worth of equipment without supervision and had to ensure that all settings were back to where they were left prior to my leaving. Was able to do a couple of college credit classes that way as a head start. But knowing that someone had that kind of trust in my ability to "self govern" if you will (was at the time considered a bit of a "wild child") and knowing what would happen to him if I were to do anything that caused any kind of a disruption to the system or his classes... That trust allowed me to settle down and realize what it was going to take to get where I was wanting to go.....

I had 2 in HS that will never know what they meant to me, DESPITE me telling them. LOL.
FWIW, they both came to my Surprise 21st Birthday Party. And I literally teared up.
I scored 9 percentile in English on the ACT(SAT Like). Anyways 91% did better than me, it was going to be my downfall.

I asked Mr. Wrosch for help. Sr. English, he made me redo 9th Grade English, 10th Grade English after school. On my own, except once per week we would meet and review. The first time I show up without doing all of the work, I was OUT!

He taught me to ALWAYS go back to basics to learn. And the PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE. He knew Tim Spanke. So they talked. They strategized how to get me engaged (Tim told him to make it sound harder than it was, that I was that kind of DIE Trying person, and beating it would keep me going).

They MANIPULATED ME into becoming a well-rounded student. LOL. They set me up for success.
I wrote a decently long letter when Mr. Wrosch past. The family posted it, and I got pinged by people who were in attendance. It was the least I could do.
I'd still be 30 miles outside of Detroit.. Poor and Broke with no future had these 2 not saw something and encouraged me.

Haha.... Can relate. I've been trying to teach young engineers the basic design protocols that I learned designing buildings with AutoCAD and paper drawings. The technology has been replaced along with the basic design review process. Now, engineers are working like maniacs at break-neck speed and producing screwed up designs. With the massive skill/age gap created by the Great Recession along with the pandemic it's me trying to communicate with a bunch of engineers in their 20s. Smart kids. But, it's like I'm talking Greek. And, they think it's normal to spend all your time fixing stuff in construction. I used to never do that. Makes one think...

I think most of us had a few of them. For me, it was one in grade school, and two in high school (one chemistry, one literature/english). I took every class I could that either of them taught; I knew the best way I could learn and grow was to be pushed to (or past) my limits. And Jake, I'm absolutely with you: I don't know where I'd be without them seeing something in me that made them push.

Learned COBOL working in an IBM Mainframe IT shop in the late 1980's. I detested that language as verbose and cumbersome (I know more common languages, C, Pascal, Fortran, Basic, LISP, but am not a programmer). However, I recently learned that COBOL has inherent features for data integrity that other (no other?) language has. Interesting.

I guess Adm Grace Hopper wasn't all bad ;)

Agreed on the teacher seeing something in you! Had two of them like that, and would not be where I am without them.... And neither one of them, or me, knew that at the time.....

Ooooooo, I remember that bad programming thingy! Careful careful, LOL!

Back in the '70s I wanted to get some experience on the PDP-11 in our department, but it never really happened. I got assigned to a CDC Cyber-18 job and then HP-1000 for a time. The department bought a Data General Eclipse S/130 and found out it wouldn't do the job they bought it for. Oops. It was programmed to run diagnostics on itself so when management came to see what we were doing it's lights would be blinking like it was doing something. This went on for a year and I was approached to program it (FORTRAN 5 - DGs flavor on the Eclipse) for a special project. I was offered the seemingly impossible schedule and bet a steak dinner from the boss I could do it with the help of a college intern. I got my steak. I later saw a meme regarding the Eclipse: 101 uses for an Eclipse S/130, #1: Boat anchor. Apparently others weren't enamored by it, either.

YES! I wore pocket protectors through high school and most of my programming career, too! I wasn't on the chess team, but burned a lot of HS lunch breaks with the chess board. I wasn't a complete nerd in HS, though, because I was stupid enough to sneak out for a smoke.

Plus one for the algebra joke!!

Fed Regs.... Could very well have been.

Yep! Any language at all.... Had not heard that one in a ... while.

Yeah, not so much. I was a Jr. in HS. He was a Senior, and he was the student SysOp. A Cherished title. But having a Jr. show him up was bit over the top for him. The fact that I did that and he had ZERO idea how to fix it...

He eventually stepped down and handed me the mantle 1/2 way through my Jr year. Making me the first Jr. that had the SysOp title!

The teacher was okay with it, because I flew through everything. I Finished the 16 Week Cobol course in 1 month. And then the 16 Week Fortran course in 7 days! (Which completed my senior year classes in my junior year). So it became independent study.

We learned so much.
The teach, Tim Spanke, would let us into the School in the AM, and call the alarm company. He would leave and we would spend all saturday cranking on code, etc. And then we would call him at home, he would call the alarm company and say he ws leaving.

you cannot fathom how much we learned. After 2yrs of that intensity. My first job, I was teaching the much older developer how to optimize their systems. Heck, I even showed them how to write "CODE" onto track 0 of tape, to make the Tape BOOTABLE. Something they thought was impossible.

The value of having a teacher see something in you, and encourage you. Priceless. May he rest in peace.

Brilliant. If I'd been Mark, I'd have saluted you and offered to buy lunch. If I'm a moron and someone points it out like that, I have to respect it, and laugh at myself.

Okay, I am a few years behind you guys.
I got to punch a punch card for fun! (Learned how to change our phone bill, tape over the other hole), and send the check for the proper amount, it marked your account fully paid if the check matched the card. LMAO. NOT that I did that. I learned about it.

But I did grow up with CLOAD on the TRS-80. (Cassette Load, or read from cassette tape). Where you learn they stored your program as sounds. SO Cool.

Later we realized we could connect a voice activated recorder to a phone line, and record the entire computer conversations (username, password, etc). And by building a bandpass filter, you could clip the audio to ONE side of the conversation and play a lot of it back into an Acuostic Modem and get a lot more information than you thought possible.

Doing that kind of stuff as a teenager is what caused me to fall in love with software. I was almost published in the DEC Professional Magazine as a high school student. I rewrote the startup routines that used to take 5 minutes to initialize the system, and had them done in 26 seconds. This allowed us to reboot the computer between classes, and during lunch, to try out crazy ideas on scratch systems. (I crashed a LOT of systems back in the day, learning).

Last Great Memory. We had ONE guy who always booted the wrong disk. I changed the message from "Non-System Disk Error" To "Good Going Valade, you did it AGAIN!"

The entire room went wild the first time Mark Valade hit that message. He kinda hated me for that...

Whe I arrived at DoD, i was told to look at the Cobol code of a black woman who had screwed up the entire comm system software. This for an agency which is responsible for world-wide US communication - embassies, military bases, etc. She had reversed the register readings - instead of going from right-to-left, she went left-to-right - like ASCII code for the character "9" is 57, and its binary representation is 00111001 - however she set the registers backwards - 10011100. She was an affirmative action hire with a degree in psychology, while the position was supposed to require a tech degree. She reopeatedly threatened management with lawsuits if she was not constantly promoted. One time I informed her I knew the minister at her Alabama church, and she accused me of being in the KKK (Our churches worked together). Dumb as a rock, last I heard she had transferred to the IRS, was pulling down $250k in Senior Executive Service.

My first boss there was also black, who wasted a scholarship to Carnegie-Mellon (their wishful affirmative action program attempted to help selected blacks, who simply lacked the ability to get through their hi-tech progams) and spent the whole day in the next cubical on the phone proselytizing for his church and arguing with his ex-wife.

I did all the coding for these underqualifed jerks who blamed all their problems on "racists".

Did anybody have an Amiga or Atari? I wrote "Audio Gallery" in 1989 but MSFT came along and bankrupted all other platforms, except Apple, they clung on the edge with a 5% share. MSFT set back technology about 10-15 years.

"Coding Regimen (a prescribed course of treatment) may have referred to FedGov regulations - such as at DoD, we were told to use certain font colors, font types, how to arrange things on the screen, etc. Anal oversight.

Clapping..I like nerd jokes. (And no, that was not an insult. I wear it with honor. My "badge": I had a pocket protector in high school, and I was on the chess team.)

I grew up on a PDP-11/34a in High School.
I taught myself MACRO-11 Assembler. Which was a lot like Motorola Assembly. Very Rich. Unlike Intel, Uggh...

Later, I found C, and I took to it like a duck in water. I actually rewrote one of Peter Nortons utilities and sent it back to them, I have a letter on their letter head while I was still a student, LOL.

Anyways... While learning C, I found out. It was first written on a PDP-8 and it was made to reflect the ASSEMBLY on that machine, so it was easy to transform almost right into assembly.

Everything was so simple in those days. C++ did to C what the Alphabet did to Math... (An algebra Joke my daughter loved... I love x. I have no problem with x. Except I hate finding him! My life would be a lot easier if X wasn't always needing to be found!)

My favorite FORTRAN joke:

God is Real... Unless declared otherwise...

For non programmers, variables starting with various letters had various types. G variables were a Real type (meaning a floating point/not an integer, like A-F, specifically I)

My next favorite FORTRAN nugget.
The values of numbers were stored in an array.
You could write:
7 = 5
And change the value of "7" to be equal to 5.
I believe this is called BAD PROGRAMMING.